Blog

Just wanted to put up a link to the latest cover story of Outlook on sanitation in India. It is appropriately called "The Throneless." Also, accept our apologies for the lack of blog posts this week. The team is in...Read More..

I have several friends who have done fieldwork in Rajasthan's Churu district, and I was pleasantly surprised (and later disappointed) by this article on efforts to reduce open defecation in the district by Rukmini. The efforts seem to be paying...Read More..

The Hindu published a hard-hitting op-ed three days ago in which Dr. Krishna Kumar, one of India's leading educationists, rues that "the impact of poverty on children’s life at school and learning is understood rather vaguely not just by educational...Read More..

That's what a new working paper, joint with Sneha Lamba, seems to suggest. Read the paper here: "Effects of Early-Life Exposure to Sanitation on Childhood Cognitive Skills: Evidence from India's Total Sanitation Campaign." Some of you may have seen an...Read More..

Search For Investigators Click HERE to tell us you’re interested! research institute for compassionate economics Open defecation kills Indian children and stunts their growth. Since open defecation is so bad for people, why do almost more than half of Indian...Read More..

Today we have a guest post from our wonderful colleague/guide/interpreter in Bangladesh, Zubair Karim. Zubair, thanks so much for your perspective and for all of your help on the trip! It really would not have been nearly as successful without...Read More..

There has been a lot about the trip to Bangladesh that has impressed me. One thing that stands out, though, is just how much people want latrines. Driving from Rajshahi to Dhaka, we stopped at a cluster of houses by...Read More..

The Hindu has written a compelling editorial on child mortality in India. We're visiting Bangladesh these days to learn from their success in reducing open defecation, and are as struck as the editorialists are by the comparison between these neighboring...Read More..

For the last several days, most of the rice team has been in Bangladesh trying to understand how they did it. Did what, you ask? Reduce open defecation, of course! It turns out that open defecation is pretty rare in...Read More..

For the last several days, most of the rice team has been in Bangladesh trying to understand how they did it. Did what, you ask? Reduce open defecation, of course! It turns out that open defecation is pretty rare in...Read More..

Psychologists and behavioral economists have long identified an "identifiable victim effect": people are much more likely to donate to help if an appeal mentions one needy person than if millions of people in need are invoked. This may be paradoxical...Read More..

Rukmini S., of the Hindu, has just published a very insightful new article, accompanied by this photo, about life at the top of the Indian income distribution. She explains that even the wealthiest people in India are shorter than they...Read More..

Check out this new paper by Oliver, Dean and Arabinda in PLOS One, based on new data on stunting from the recent Hungama Survey, and sanitation data from the Indian census. The Hindu reported the findings of the paper, too....Read More..

I just posted a preliminary draft of a new working paper that suggests that open defecation is an important cause of anemia, a disease which affects large numbers of children in India, causing cognitive and developmental delays. In case you...Read More..

Check out this link to a discussion of rice's work on sanitation, stunting, and the height conference in TIME magazine. You can also click on TIME's picture reprinted here for a link to the story. ...Read More..